Midnight Without a Moon(7)

“But Levi already took off early on Friday,” I complained.

Ma Pearl’s face hardened. “Stay outta grown folks’ bizness.”

Well, it was my business if I had to go out there to that hot cotton field and do the work of three men, one full?grown and two almost grown. But I couldn’t say that to Ma Pearl. She would’ve slapped me clear on into July of 1956.

She wobbled over to the icebox and pulled out a quart-size bottle of buttermilk. With a heavy sigh, she lumbered back to the table and slowly poured the buttermilk straight from the bottle into the mixture of flour and crumbled butter. While turning the stiff mixture with a fork, she mumbled under her breath, “Anna Mae and Pete did right leaving this dirn place. Nothing here but a bunch a trouble.”

I tilted my head to the side. “Ma Pearl—”

She scowled.

I sealed my lips.

With her forehead creased, Ma Pearl went back to work on the biscuits.

She shook extra tablespoons of flour into the sticky mixture as she began half singing, half moaning, “Stay outta grown folks’ bizness,” as if it were a real song. “All these dirn chi’rens jest oughta stay outta grown folks’ bizness.”

While her fingers shaped the sticky batter into dough, her made-up lyrics morphed into the humming of a real song. “‘Why should I feel discouraged,’” she sang quietly, “‘and why should the shadows come? Why should my heart be lonely, and long for heav’n and home?’”

Something was wrong. Mr. Albert Jackson and Levi and Fish never missed a full day of work. And Ma Pearl never bothered with Gospel music unless it was Wednesday or Sunday, church days. Otherwise, she swayed and snapped her fingers to the blues.

I pulled back the curtain and stared into the early morning darkness again. As the sun peeked over the horizon, promising another blazing hot day, Slick Charlie finally got his lazy self up and crowed. I dropped the curtain and stared down at a crack in the floorboards as I listened to Ma Pearl’s chanting, “‘Jesus is my portion. A constant friend is he. His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.’”

Her singing annoyed me. I was thirteen, not three. If something had happened to Mr. Albert and his sons, I was old enough to know about it. I studied Ma Pearl’s face for answers as she worked the big ball of dough. She rolled and patted, stretched and pulled, concentrating, as if that beige lump were the most important thing in her life at the moment.

I tried one more time. Taking a deep breath and letting it out, I quickly asked, “How come Mr. Albert ain’t coming?”

Ma Pearl’s hand paused midpat. She glanced at me but didn’t say a word. She sighed and began patting the dough again. “Colored folks just oughta stay in their place. It’d keep us all outta a whole lotta trouble. One Negro do something, white folks get mad at everybody.”

I rubbed goose bumps from my arms even though it was probably a hundred and ten degrees in the kitchen with that stove burning. Mr. Albert didn’t seem to be the kind of Negro who would get in trouble with the whites. To my knowledge, he had always stayed in his place, just like Papa. Just like white folks like Ricky Turner warned us to do when he chased us off the road with his pickup. Then I had the nerve to challenge him by tossing a rock his way and by poking my tongue out at him. I couldn’t help but wonder what Ma Pearl would have thought of that.

Cautiously I asked, “Did Mr. Albert do something? Is he in trouble?”

Ma Pearl ignored my question. “Fetch me that rolling pin from the safe.”

As I got up to get the rolling pin, she spoke under her breath. “These young folks don’t know noth’n. Go’n get us all kil’t. Running round here talking ’bout the right to vote.”

Young folks? Levi or Fish. But right to vote? That would be Mr. Albert. He was the only one old enough to vote. Now I was even more confused. Could Mr. Albert even read? And surely he wouldn’t do anything to stir up trouble with whites in Stillwater.

My heart pounded as I opened the door of the gleaming white cabinet where we kept things we didn’t want the rats to feast on during the night. Just two months before, back in May, a preacher named Reverend George Lee had been killed for helping colored folks register to vote. I prayed that nothing like that had happened to Mr. Albert.

“A Negro ain’t got the right to do nothing ’cept live free and die,” Ma Pearl said.

Live free? When we couldn’t even walk up the road without being chased down by a peckerwood in a pickup? I didn’t realize my hand was shaking until I reached up to the middle shelf for the rolling pin and knocked over a Mason jar full of last winter’s pear preserves. Like dominoes, that jar knocked over another jar, and that one, another. All three of them rolled out of the cabinet and crashed to the floor.

“Gal, watch what you doing!”

“Ma Pearl—” I started, but didn’t finish. It wouldn’t do any good. I could tell from those lines in her forehead that she didn’t want any apology I had to offer. Plus, I knew it wasn’t just those fallen preserves and the sticky mess they made that had her in a huff.

I handed her the rolling pin and sighed. “I’ll clean it up.”

Ma Pearl groaned. “I’ll clean it up myself. You just go’n in there and git yo’self ready to work. I didn’t git you up early jest to sit round here and run yo’ mouth. You got a long day ahead. Now git. You know how slow you is.”